Coordination and Learning with a Partial Language

This paper explores how efficiency promotes the use of structure in language. It starts from the premise that one of language's central characteristics is to provide a means for saying novel things about novel circumstances, its creativity. It is reasonable to expect that in a rich and changing environment, language will be incomplete. This encourages reliance on structure. It is shown how creative language use emerges from common knowledge structures, even if those structures are consistent with an a priori absence of a common language. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C60, C72.